


Rubix Cubes

by jerseydevious



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Blood and Injury, Depression, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Suicidal Thoughts, don't you dare yell at me for this, first of all bipercabeth dared me and i took it too far but it's fine really, if i write about it because he wrote it bad that's my prerogative man, second of all rick put it in the damn book in the first place, the one time i will recognize HOO exists, updated: now with more mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Percy gets injured on the way to Annabeth's dorm.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson & Sally Jackson
Comments: 81
Kudos: 389





	1. Euthanasia

**Author's Note:**

> If you didn't read the tags! Go heed the tags! They're there for a reason! This one's a humdinger, my dudes.

It’d taken Chiron paying a visit to the city, and some forged records, and liberal application of the Mist, but Annabeth and Percy had been able to slide right into their junior year of high school. It was harder than Annabeth had expected it to be, which was more than a little humbling, but if she wanted to attend the college of her dreams, she had to have the most spotless high school record she could, because her early education was fabricated almost entirely by the Mist, and she’d flip-flopped between high schools, on account of being a part-time world-saver. Anyone on an admissions board with half a clearsighted eye could’ve seen that she was lying through her teeth. Percy mostly just hadn’t wanted to be in high school longer than he had to, and joked a lot that skipping a year of school was a good way to get paid back, for the not-infrequent world-saving.

She’d thought she was prepared to adjust to the jump between years, she’d thought she’d patched the holes of her missing sophomore year fairly well on her own, but junior year was still the hardest she’d ever had to work for anything academically; and if she was struggling beneath the weight of her study schedule, she knew it had to be worse for Percy. At least she enjoyed it on some level—Percy hated it through-and-through, every inch of the process frustrated him. He wasn’t talking to her about it, the way he had sometimes before, over long Iris Messages, through emails. She used to like helping him through schoolwork, because there was an honest kind of joy in helping him figure out that he was not nearly as dumb as he thought he was, he was just designed to learn differently. But his jaw tightened now whenever she asked about it, and he was moody enough these days that she didn’t really feel like prodding him about it more, not when it’d just lead to a stilted, heavy silence. Not when it’d put him in a bad mood for days at a time. Not when it’d lead to sitting beside him and feeling like he might as well have been halfway across the world, not a tangible memory in his head, for how approachable he felt. He’d always been pessimistic, but she used to be able to talk him out of it, when she tried.

She was curled around her trigonometry workbook when Percy let himself in—through the window, the one she always left unlocked for him, so he could sneak in after scaling the fire escape. There was a certain privacy to her dorm that they didn’t have at Sally’s, even though they were at Sally’s often enough.

“Hi,” she said, tapping the end of her pen against the page. The word problem in front of her scrambled itself into trains of nonsensical letters. “I’m suffering.”

Percy grunted. The noise made her turn and look at him, and he was leaned against the wall by the open window, head craned backwards and his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. She gave herself a moment to trace the lean line of it with her eyes, the slice of shadow that dipped into his collarbone. He was in layers, against the bitter cold front New York City stood against, a jean jacket buttoned up over a hoodie—hastily, too, because the buttons were pulled through the wrong holes. She could see just that slice of shadow, and the sweat beading on his throat.

“Did you run here?” she asked. Sometimes he did. She usually made him lay on the floor until he was mostly dried off, when he did, because she liked her bed _not_ smelling like a sweaty, gross mess.

He tilted his head forward, blinked at her. “It’s fucking cold,” he said, by way of explanation. His words were raspy. Slowly he settled on the floor in front of her bed, back pressed against the frame, the back of his head bumping into her knee. She leaned forward and ruffled his hair, and her fingers met thick, sweat-soaked curls.

“You didn’t have to run here,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. _Excited, much,_ she wanted to say, but it was a bit too early to decide if he was in the mood for teasing.

“I—” he said, and it was clear to her that there were words that were supposed to follow that he wasn’t offering, but he tacked on a miserable little, “did. Sorry.”  
  


“How was your day?” she asked. She resigned herself to working one-handed, and knotted her fingers lazily in Percy’s hair, and he leaned into the touch with a soft, throaty noise.

“Fine,” he said. “How’s… how—the, uh. The—uh.”

Annabeth snickered. She shifted her knee and then pushed aside her workbook, cupping Percy’s cheeks and tipping his head back. His face was hot to the touch, and when his eyes flicked up at her, they were folded at the corners in an almost nervous way. His bruised eye was still swollen, but better than it had been yesterday, or the day before. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, and it was burning, too, but it was probably from the run. Excited, much. She tapped his cheekbone, beneath his bruised eye. “How’s this healing.”

“Fine,” he said, thickly. “I… I love you.”

Annabeth grinned. “I love you, too,” she said. “But that’s not a good diversion tactic, sorry to say. Did you see him today?”

“Him,” Percy said.

“Braxton,” she said. “The guy you knocked out.”

Friday had been awful, because Percy had called her at five in the evening with a mumble, saying, _remember that guy I told you about, the one I told to fuck off and stop bothering people, y’know. Stop, stop, I didn’t start it, I swear, I really didn’t. I just reacted. Strongly. I reacted strongly. He’s—unconscious. A little bit? I’m sorry, ‘Beth._

Percy shrugged, and winced, his lip curling. “Fuck him,” he said, quietly, eyes drifting shut. “How’s—how’s the… can’t remember.”

Annabeth frowned, and then moved to the corner of the bed, and patted the rumpled comforter. “Take a nap,” she said. She was starting to think that, despite the fact that Percy no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it had scrambled his sleeping patterns permanently; he slept more now than he had then, seemed to somehow need it more than he had, then.

“M’good,” Percy mumbled, his head dropping back down to his chest. “M’good here.”

She left it at that, would rather give Percy space to work through whatever mood it was that he was in, before she tried prying it out of him. He’d been off ever since Braxton. He’d lied about it to his mom, which Annabeth thought was maybe the first time he’d lied to his mom directly, instead of just offering lie after lie of omission. It wasn’t Annabeth’s place to question what Percy decided to keep from his mother, but she couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind this one—she couldn’t figure out why he’d find it so important to lie about something he did in self-defense. Something that Braxton himself was too embarrassed to press charges for. Annabeth refocused herself on her trigonometry workbook, sometimes stretching across the bed to pull out notes she’d made of online videos she’d devoured about Algebra II, the math course she’d missed in favor of saving the world. It didn’t take long for the nearly-winter night to fall, and Annabeth shuffled to stand up and turn on a lamp, because the word problems crawled even further across the page in the nearly-winter dark.

She moved around Percy, who was slumped over, eyes shut and lashes dusting his cheeks, and pulled the cord of her bedside lamp. There was a thud behind her as the light flooded the room, and Annabeth turned—Percy had startled, bumping his shoulder against the wooden slat of the bedframe, was staring at her with wide, shocked eyes. His hair was curled against his forehead, soaked through with sweat, and she almost said _you’re sick, let me call Sally,_ because he shouldn’t still be sweating. Then she spotted the wide, black-red patch over his stomach.

Her world tunneled to a single point; the black-red, the way it glistened in the yellow light, its position over a fragile stomach, protected by no curse. “You’re bleeding,” she said, softly, though she’d intended to scream it. She worked through possibilities in an instant, but he hadn’t moved since he’d gotten here, and if he’d been attacked she would have seen it, and that meant his heart had been pumping blood out of his body this entire time. Annabeth’s cheeks flushed with rage or fear or both.

Percy didn’t answer. He cut his eyes away, breathing hard, and Annabeth’s mouth tasted like cotton and her pulse roared in her ears. She crashed to her knees beside him, sliding her arms beneath his and hiking him upwards, staggering beneath his weight. Carrying Percy had been easier, when he’d been smaller than her, when they’d been the same size, and right now she missed those days more than anything in the world. If the gods had asked after her heart’s deepest desire, in that second, she would have asked to be twelve years old with Percy forever, just the two of them wading through the shallows of the lake catching frogs so Percy could try and find one he could talk to. Now he was taller and folded over her shoulders because he couldn’t stand up on his own, and summer was months away, and her heart was in her throat and beating there, because he’d been lying on the floor of her dorm and bleeding out while she did her fucking _trigonometry_ homework.

“Why didn’t you fucking say something,” tripped out of her mouth, hurried and rushed, filled with every ounce of her confusion, and she pushed him at the bathroom counter. He flopped on it more than he balanced on it, his back hitting the tiled backsplash and listing dangerously to the side, and he hooked a hand—his right hand, with the knuckles that were still swollen and bruised from the last time he’d been in a fight—into the ridge of the sink’s basin and held on to keep himself upright.

It was sad, the way her hands were sure, the way even as her mind scrambled for purchase between the domesticity of five minutes ago and the bloodstains coloring her hands now, her hands knew what to do. She popped his jacket open, sending aluminum buttons knocking into the walls, one bouncing off the door, and she didn’t bother trying to have Percy take it off all the way. He was barely upright, and it would be a waste of time. The blue hoodie beneath the jacket had started pooling blood, the material too soaked to retain any more of it, and she ground her teeth and then bolted out of the room, rifling in her desk drawer for her scissors. She used them to cut her flashcards. Today they’d cut her boyfriend’s hoodie open, so she could clean a wound that would otherwise kill him.

When she returned Percy had managed to pull himself up a little straighter, and his eyes were following her, utterly blank and half-lidded. The only tell that anything on him hurt at all was the severe way his brows were drawn together.

“If you live,” she said, savagely, fumbling with the stitched collar of Percy’s hoodie, “I’m going to fucking kill you. And then I’m going to bring you back. And then I’m going to let your mom fucking kill you.”

Percy grunted, and Annabeth’s heart pounded with rage and confusion and then rage because of the confusion. She couldn’t think about if she’d looked up later, if Percy had bled out just ten feet from her supply of nectar and ambrosia, just ten feet from running water, less than that from her. When she’d sliced through the collar, the thickest part of the hoodie, she took both sides in her hands and ripped it open. She didn’t have time to cut something cleanly.

He hadn’t been wearing a shirt beneath the hoodie, the way she’d assumed, and with the force she’d used to rip the fabric in half, she’d torn it out of where it’d dried into the wound on his stomach. It poured fresh blood. Annabeth slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle his scream with her palm, the echo of it loud in the closed space, and the she pulled him forward and whispered, “Shh, baby, shh, you have to be quiet, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over into his matted curls until the scream tapered off into hiccupping sobs against her hand. Her unoccupied hand curled into his hair, and Annabeth had to swallow against the tears crawling up her throat. Her fault. That sound was her fault.

“I’m sorry,” she said, turning her face to press a lopsided kiss to his clammy temple. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

His chest bucked here and there, as he tried to muffle his own reaction, and somehow it made Annabeth’s heart twist even harder than before. She hadn’t known it was possible, to hurt worse than she did when she heard Percy scream in pain. She propped him back against the backsplash and pulled back the halves of fabric in order to peer at the wound—ragged, somewhat circular. He’d been impaled by something. Her stomach turned. It took every ounce of her not to throw up into the sink beside them.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” she said, her voice thready. “I don’t—you were sitting there, you were just sitting there, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you—”

She yanked open the door of the cabinet beneath the sink, leaving bloody smears in her wake, pulled out her first aid kid, flicked open the lid and pulled out the canteen of nectar. It was a risk, to pump someone full of the food of the gods before properly cleaning a wound—medical care for demigods was above her paygrade, even on the best of days, because there were a lot of catches and ugly surprises wrapped within it. Human bodies, even half-human bodies, weren’t designed to treat healing like a race to the finish, and the larger the wound and the closer to death the demigod, the more complicated it became. But he’d be dead in ten minutes if she didn’t give the ichor in him something to hang on to. She had to prize it, that ichor, because it was the only reason he was alive at all.

She patted his cheek, peppering smudges of blood on his brown skin. “Look at me, look at me,” she said. “Eyes on me, baby.”

His eyes flickered open, fixed her with a half-present kind of stare. She pressed the canteen to his lips and tilted his head back, pouring the canteen into his mouth, praying that he wouldn’t choke on it. Nectar had to be swallowed, to be effective, because the world of the gods was bound by its laws.

Percy spluttered for a moment and then swallowed, and she’d only planned on giving him half the canteen at first, but between her panic and the shallow breaths rocketing in her lungs and the way his blood burned her, she tipped all of it into his mouth. It might’ve been a mistake. It might have saved his life. She wouldn’t know until his pulse evened out—if it ever did.

She pumped hand sanitizer on her hands and rubbed it in, and then she prodded the wound, searching for anything that might be lodged inside; Percy hissed, and then swore, but this time the sound made her heart lift because he if he was aware enough to swear instead of scream, it was an improvement. If he was in pain, then at least he was still alive. She peeled out fluff leftover from the fabric, and then pulled out a stout, short but hard-and-sharp sliver of yellow-ivory bone.

“Boar,” Percy gasped. “Calydonian boar. Got—got me outside of the school.”

“It better be dead,” she said. _Calydonian boar,_ she thought. The leaves were scorched by its breath and lightning came from its mouth, and its tusks were the size of an Indian elephant’s.

“Headless,” Percy answered, and his grin was crooked, and even with Annabeth’s bloody handprints on his face, he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Beautiful, and she was angrier at him than she ever had been in her entire life.

She didn’t grin back. She looked away and then said, “We have to irrigate it. Bathtub, now.”

She slid an arm under his shoulders and helped him off the counter, one hand pressed flat against his sternum. She could feel the vibration in his chest, through her fingers, of every hiss and groan, but more importantly she could feel the butterfly-beat of his heart. She focused on it, let her world tunnel to that single point. Annabeth hobbled them both to the bathtub and flicked the water on, and pulled them both beneath the spray, backing herself against the far wall and spreading her legs so Percy could lay between them, the ragged wound on his stomach directly beneath the cold spray. This was the part that made her nervous, the part that was uncharted territory—for every other demigod, it was at least mostly reliable, to chug as much nectar as you could and then race against time to clean and irrigate a wound as best you could, before it healed on you. The nectar would keep you alive as long as you could make sure your flesh didn’t zipper shut with an arrowhead, or a talon, or anything lodged inside of it. But the water required for irrigation healed Percy, too—if he healed with shards of anything inside of him, the wound had to be reopened, and picked clean, and re-closed. The rate at which he healed always seemed different, too, something she couldn’t pin down, something she couldn’t rely on. It was guesswork, wondering whether the water would heal him fast enough, wondering whether it would heal him all the way. But he couldn’t die in water. She held onto that, and held it close to her.

His head fell against her stomach. His knees were folded up, because her bathtub wasn’t overly large, or even a decent size, and it was maybe the most uncomfortable cuddling they’d ever had, but her grip on him was vice-like. Blood streamed into the basin in long, curling snatches of rose pink water. It would have been pretty, if it wasn’t the life she was tied to that was spiraling down the drain. If that hadn’t been close enough to her own blood that it felt like her heart was hammering against her sternum to compensate.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured, after several long minutes. “I don’t—I don’t fucking _understand.”_

“Can this wait,” he said, softly.

“Can this wait,” she repeated. “Is that what you were thinking, bleeding out on my fucking—”

“I don’t—want to fight,” he said. “I don’t… you know it’s not working. You can see it.”

Annabeth’s eyes snapped to the hole in his stomach. It wasn’t any more closed than it had been before, the way she’d assumed it would—closed somewhat more than it had been, thanks to the nectar, but it was still losing too much blood, it was still far too wide for the water to have done anything. She couldn’t think about it. It was irrigated and that was enough for her, that was enough until he was stable in the way that meant she could breathe for three seconds, and he maybe wouldn’t die on her while she wasn’t looking, while she was breathing. “Why isn’t it,” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “Why isn’t it—stay here.”

She pulled herself out of the bathtub. Percy made a cut-off noise in his throat, as she jostled him, and she swallowed hard. She snatched the bag of ambrosia squares from the medical kit and thrust it at him, and said, “All of it, eat it, now.”

Percy took the bag gingerly. “It’s—it might torch me,” he said.

“Do it and stay in the water,” she snapped. “It—you—you can’t die, in the water, just stay there.”

It wasn’t enough. The more powerful the demigod, the higher the threshold for the food of the gods, and Percy was about as powerful as they came. There was every rational reason to believe he could take it, but he sounded hysterical to her own ears. She couldn’t imagine how she sounded to Percy, but, well, she wasn’t the one who had spent the night passively bleeding out on her floor without thinking to mention it. If she was hysterical, it was his fucking fault.

Percy looked like he wanted to say something. _You can see it,_ maybe, that the water wasn’t as kind to him anymore, and she got the sense from his heavy, resigned expression that he knew a lot more than what he was telling her. She was tired of Percy, and his incessant, unfathomable, inscrutable need to hide exactly the things she needed to know—she was tired of getting calls where he said _I might have a concussion_ because things had escalated between him and someone else at his school enough that after-hours fights had broken out about it. She was tired of Percy tightening his jaw when she asked him how his day was, she was tired of never being able to predict which days he’d be mild and which days he’d jump down her throat for every little thing; she was tired of knowing things were tense between him and Sally and never knowing why, she was tired of the way she knew he was struggling in school and he wouldn’t ask her for help, and she was even fucking tired of how much he _slept._ Sometimes she wondered if Hera hadn’t taken more than just his memories, if Hera hadn’t ran her hands along the things that had made Percy himself, and snapped them cleanly in half.

She fixed him with the harshest glare she could offer, and Percy looked away, and finished off the ambrosia without looking at her again. The hole in his stomach had closed more, the skin and muscle forcing its way together, enough so that she could possibly pack it with antibiotic ointment and gauze and hopefully it wouldn’t scar as nasty. Her stitches weren’t the best—her hands weren’t the steadiest. It wasn’t a deep tissue procedure, now, at least. It looked _—okay,_ surprisingly enough, but now her hands were shaking and she couldn’t force them to stop.

Annabeth pointed to the counter. Her whole arm trembled, and he could see it, and it burned. “Do, do you need—I have to—”

She rose anyway, scrambling to help Percy up, and then help him slide back on her bloodstained white tile counter. She’d be scrubbing the blood out of it for a good while. She didn’t talk, while she swept ointment over what was left of the wound, and tried to push the following hitch in Percy’s breath out of her mind. Annabeth was still thinking about his scream, from earlier. She might hear it for the rest of her life. After it was slathered in ointment, she packed it with bandages, and then let her trembling fingers find Percy’s pulse. His skin was feverish where he’d had so much nectar and ambrosia, and his pulse fluttered, but it was strong enough for someone who had almost died on her bathroom counter. Strong enough that he’d see tomorrow.

Annabeth’s head fell against his chest, and she forced her breathing to slow, until it matched Percy’s pulse, until it got slower. Percy’s other hand rose and cradled her neck, overly warm.

“Sweetheart,” he said, softly.

“Why would you do that,” she said. “I don’t—why, why, _why_ the fuck would you do that.”

Percy hummed, and bent to press a kiss to her shoulder, and then she knew he wasn’t going to answer. He was going to sit there and hold her and pretend like he hadn’t almost died, and she could see it, the way the future spread out in front of her; she’d let him curl up in her bed and she’d curl beside him and they’d sleep, and then he’d realize he needed to get home, race for his own apartment the way he always did. She’d ask him how his day had been tomorrow, and he’d say _fine,_ and she’d ask him how his school was going, and he’d stop answering, and they’d do it day after day after day. She had been holding out for the hour that Percy was honest with her. She’d expected Percy would talk to her, when he could, when he wanted to, about whatever it was that bothered him, and now she knew that day was never going to come. That his plan, the entirety of it, was to bleed out on the floor of her dorm and never once mention it. That he was content to do that for the rest of his life. That his life was going to be a lot shorter, if he got his way.

Annabeth pulled away from him and swiped furiously at her eyes. “You don’t get to do this to me,” she said, roughly. “No, fuck you, you _don’t._ Why didn’t you say anything? You were here for at least half an hour. You could have died, because you didn’t say anything, and I want to know why.”

Percy ducked his head. “I’m stupid, I guess.”

“That’s not true, either,” she snapped. “You’re impulsive and you can be reckless. That’s not stupid and that’s not this.”

He took stock of her, eyes scanning over her, and she must’ve looked like hell, sopping wet and flushed and bloodsoaked and crying. Percy flicked his hand, and the sink beside him rattled to life. He held his hand beneath the water, and the bruises clouding his knuckles didn’t fade a single shade. “It stopped working,” he said. “The healing. I think he knows, my dad. I think he knows… maybe that’s why I don’t, uh, like the water, anymore. Because he knows what I did to Akhlys. Because I don’t deserve it anymore.” The water cut off. Percy’s hand was still dry, but he shook it like it was wet. “He’s right, though. I abused it. I shouldn’t get the benefits of it, after—after that. It’s like… you know what they do to dogs, when they start hurting people. They put ‘em down.”

“Euthanasia,” Annabeth said, and her words weren’t words, not really, just the ghost of them. _They put ‘em down,_ she thought. The nerves in her heart were beyond aching. She just felt cold, now. It surprised her, almost, how angry she was, how much she wanted to scream, _you’re not a fucking dog, you’re the love of my life, you mean the world to me, are you blind?_ but she’d had enough of screaming.

Percy wouldn’t look at her. “After Mount Saint Helens I wondered if I should stay dead, to you guys, at least. I’d set one of the most dangerous monsters the gods had ever faced loose. I displaced half a million people, I don’t know how many people I injured. It’s—it’s fucked up, that I don’t even know, that I don’t even know their names. But I can’t… I can’t do that to you. I know I scared you. You don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve you.”

She searched his face, looking for the tell, waiting for him to be kidding—it had to be a joke, but his gaze on his hands was earnest and hard and sharp. He believed in his words the way he believed that his father was punishing him, the same way he believed that the sun rose in the morning and fell at dusk, the same way he believed in any objective truth. She could read it on every inch of him, how much he believed it, because if he had been lying to her it wouldn’t have looked like he’d just pulled barbed wire through his throat to say it.

She was silent for so long that he looked up at her, and it was his eyes widening that told her she was crying. She swiped at her eyes, scrubbed her face with the inside of her t-shirt, and then looked at him again, the way he was slumped forward. The careful way he watched her, calculated her every movement, she knew it, she recognized it. He was expecting something to hurt, expecting it from somewhere, from the only other person in the room.

“I have some of your clothes in a drawer,” she said, evenly. A little proud, maybe, of how steady her voice ended up being. “Change. And then sit on the bed.”

Percy blinked, once, twice, and then realized she wasn’t fucking around, and slipped off of the counter slowly. He picked his way to her dresser, rooting around for his clothes. He changed and she kept him in the corner of her eye, riding the line between giving him space and making sure he didn’t take off because he felt like it. He perched lightly on the edge of the bed, when he did sit down, now in joggers and a sweatshirt, looking like he was going to dive for the window at any second. Annabeth took a moment to breathe, let the world shift around her, to let her mind sift through her recent memories of Percy, illuminating them, or darkening them. She held her knowledge in her hands and tossed it back and forth, and she ached to solve it the way she could solve a puzzle, a Rubix cube, but that wasn’t how Percy worked, and that wasn’t how anyone worked. When she was steadier than she’d been before she pulled out some of her own clothes, changed in the bathroom, and then padded out and sat in front of Percy, legs crossed beneath her.

“In Mount Saint Helens, you were fourteen and about to die, and you did what you had to do to escape. That’s not—a moral failing. That’s not bad. That’s just what happened,” she said. Her voice shuddered but it didn’t matter. “You don’t know their names because you shouldn’t have to. You didn’t do anything but survive. I was scared, sure, when I watched you… with Akhlys. But it was Tartarus, baby. I was scared of _everything._ The only person punishing you is you. The water stopped healing you because you stopped wanting it to.”

He was looking off to the side, muscles in his jaw working.

“The thing you actually did,” she said, “was scare the living hell out of me just now. We’re never doing that again. Ever. I know you don’t believe me, or what I’m saying, but that part, that part we’re agreeing on. I don’t deserve that. _You_ don’t deserve that, either.”

“Okay,” he said, finally.

She reached out and squeezed his knee. A little support, before she said what she said next; “It’s also never happening again because we’re going to talk to your mom.”

Percy jerked. “No,” he said, immediately.

“I wasn’t asking,” Annabeth said.

“No,” Percy said, his shoulders tensing. “She’ll worry.”

“And you need that,” Annabeth said. “You need that. You need people to do that. I’m not asking, Percy. Do you want her to hear it from me, or you?”

“I don’t—” Percy cut himself off. He ran a hand through his hair, and then said, “I scared you,” like it wasn’t something that had occurred to him properly before. Guilt was carved into him. But she couldn’t make him feel better, about something he’d actually done.

“You did,” she said. _I’m going to have nightmares about you dying three feet away from me for maybe the rest of my life,_ she thought.

“I’m sorry.”

“If you’re sorry, then—stay alive,” she said. Her voice broke on the last syllable. “Just, don’t—”

_Leave me,_ were those last words, the ones that she couldn’t say, because she’d tapped out of whatever reserves she’d had. Whatever had kept her functional had run out. Percy eased himself off of the bed and onto the floor next to her, and pulled her against him, and then she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on with everything she had. He murmured a long litany of _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby,_ and she let it ground her, because if he was sorry, even if he was guilty, even if he felt awful, he was alive. She cried until her ribs ached with it, and then she sucked air into her lungs and pushed Percy into her bed, because he’d have to sleep off the fever from the ambrosia and nectar, let it burn through him. She scrubbed her bathroom until it all but sparkled, and tossed the ruined and bloodstained clothes into her trashcan and buried them beneath paper so no one would see them, scrubbed the blood out from underneath her nails. Her hands knew what to do. Her hands carried her forward. Calling Sally was harder, but it was a four minute conversation, just Sally saying, _I’ve been so worried, I’ve been calling you both nonstop, is everything alright,_ and Annabeth’s responding, _it’s not, but we’re okay, we’re at my dorm, you might want to pick us up. I’m sorry._

She forgot to wipe the blood off of Percy’s face, and it was the first thing Sally saw. Sally always looked Percy over first, and had the sharpest eyes for even the slightest of limps, even the tiniest of winces; the reason that he could hide his blood even from Annabeth. An inherited family trait, those lies of omission. But watching the way Percy leaned into his mom and she let him, and the way she licked her thumb to rub it the blood off and crooned at him and he let her, and the way she took care of him and he let her—that it might not have been much of a mistake at all. The blood on Percy’s face wasn’t going to be the thing that broke his mom’s heart, that night, anyway. 


	2. Royal Flush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy and Sally talk about it, because people on Tumblr asked for that, and, like, who am I to deny them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to add a Sally part, for my sanity, and also For The Love Of A Good Fictional Mother. All the warnings still apply. Proceed cautiously, my dudes. Specific warnings for this chapter include the POV character having serious suicidal thoughts, and, also, if reading about people who pick at scars triggers you, uh, that is also ahead.

The car ride back was tense, and maybe it wasn’t the worst car ride Percy had ever had in his life, but it was up there. He felt rude doing it, but he slumped against the car door and closed his eyes and feigned sleep, the way he did when his mom checked on him in the night sometimes—the same low, deep breaths, the almost-sleep of people who couldn’t quite reach it. Percy didn’t sleep as much as he laid back and closed his eyes and tried not to think. It was a good excuse to stop _being,_ for a moment, if he was asleep, or as close as he could get to sleep.

He knew it frustrated Annabeth that he spent so much of their time together half-present, but it was easier, than looking at her and the eyes she had that looked like stratus clouds and thinking _I don’t know what I did right, and sometimes I think I didn’t do anything right at all._ It was a good excuse to forget that he wasn’t passing a single class, and that it would take monumental effort to pull his grades up to passing at this point, and that the idea of doing anything at all made him wonder if he could pull the ace up his sleeve he’d used on Akhlys on his own self. His own throat, his own lungs, his royal flush the liquid sloshing in them, a kid who could breathe underwater dying by drowning on land. Feigning sleep was a good excuse to think about the ace up his sleeve, the drowning, the royal flush, the one shot that would hit home in six hundred thousand shots. Drowning had scared him once but he wasn’t sure he was scared of much, anymore, except headstones without his name on them.

He knew it frustrated her, the way he knew Annabeth was crying in the backseat. His mom wasn’t mean enough to force her to talk in space where Annabeth didn’t have anywhere to escape to, and even if Percy could hold her, he didn’t think he’d be welcome to. He’d done enough for one night, and he was out of words to give her, words to reach her—his head pounded and his stomach throbbed and his muscles were all beaten and weak, and the idea of doing anything else for the rest of the night made him queasy. He wanted to sleep, or not-sleep, wanted to be done with the living for the day. But every time he heard Annabeth’s breath hitch, he thought about throwing himself out of the car, laying flat in the road and not getting up, not the short frenzy of drowning but the prolonged battering of being crushed into the concrete by inches. At some point Percy did fall asleep, genuinely, somewhere between the roadkill and the hum of the engine and the fact that—as much as he deserved it—he couldn’t listen to Annabeth cry for a second longer.

So when the door crashed shut he shook himself and blinked, glancing to the side. His mom was settling into the driver’s seat, but hadn’t she been driving? He twisted and the backseat was empty, and his heart was already picking up its pace, thinking of Zeus’s thunderbolts and the glint of lightning on rain-slick horns and the way his mom had died in front of him, when she pressed a hand to his chest.

“Parking garage,” his mom said. Her eyes were soft, in the intense way she could soften them, the way that made Percy sit still and listen without feeling like she hated him. “Annabeth’s inside, having casserole with Paul. I wanted to give you another minute. You look pretty tired, kiddo.”

Percy scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said, feeling a bit stupid. The minotaur and Half-Blood Hill and the horn that was almost too heavy for him to lift was years ago. Another lifetime. It was time to learn to breathe during thunderstorms and car rides, maybe, if he had the energy to figure that out.

“It looks like the two of you had a rough night,” she said, lightly.

“Kind of,” Percy said. He looked away from her and at the orange-cast concrete wall in front of them, the old stains, the gloominess of it. He was starting to think New York City was ugly; profoundly, horrifically ugly, the kind of thing people let grow because of interest in its suffering. Why the hell the kingdom of the gods was rooted in New York City, Percy couldn’t fathom it, because every inch of it was gray and every inch of it was grimy and there was a rat around every corner, and they’d had roaches in their apartment when he was a kid. He could barely remember defending it and that’d been a year ago.

His mom’s hair was pulled back into a braid, loose just because her hair was too curly to hold anything much tighter. He’d tried, when he was younger; his mom taught him how to braid on her own hair, and then in the mornings while she got ready for work, she’d hand him a lock and let him try, and it had felt like helping. Percy knew now it was to keep him busy, and away from Gabe, because in the mornings Percy was easily excitable, and Gabe had hated it when Percy was excitable more than anything. Gabe had taught him what a royal flush was.

“Pretty rough,” Percy said, weakly, tapping his fingers on his pants. He never remembered leaving clothes at Annabeth’s. She was kind of a clothing thief.

His mom’s fingers worked over her wedding ring, twisting it around and around, the way she did when she was nervous. Guilt tasted like ash in the back of his throat _. I’m sorry that when you get nervous you play with your wedding ring,_ and _I’m sorry that you were married to a bastard because of me,_ and the other things he’d never say to his mom out loud. “How badly hurt,” she said.

“There was a boar outside of school,” Percy said. “After tutoring. Calydonian boar, if you know it, I think, because it spat lightning. Avoided the lightning. Got a little… impaled.”

“Well,” she said. “I’d planned to make pork chops tomorrow, but I’ll hold off.”

Percy laughed, hard enough that it pulled the aching wound on his stomach, but he didn’t care. It felt good to laugh. It felt like it’d been a while, but he couldn’t remember. His mom always knew, somehow, inexplicably, when he needed to laugh; she’d always said laughter was a kind of medicine, and something about laughing with his mom felt better. It felt like approaching another life he almost had, one where that happened every day, so close but never fully grasping it.

“I’m going to assume you’re at least mostly okay,” she said, pinning him with a look, and Percy nodded. He tried not to think about Annabeth’s bloody hands, tried not to think about her panic, the way she’d checked his pulse. He was alive because of her, and as much as he loved her, as much as he wanted to kiss her senseless sometimes to prove it, in that moment he kind of hated her more than anything.

“Lot of ambrosia,” he said. “It’s… hot. It, er, burns you up. Internally.”

_She knows that, stupid,_ he thought.

“Do you want to head inside?” she asked, brows pinched together. “I had the heater on full blast. It’s still toasty in here.”

Percy hesitated. Annabeth was inside. He wasn’t sure he could look at her. “Not yet,” he said. “Not—not yet.”

His mom’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, lifting one of his hands up and then cupping it. “Can I ask what you’re not telling me?”

_No,_ Percy wanted to say. His throat felt thick and cold, like pack ice, the pack ice Poseidon’s bears lumbered across. He scrambled for an answer that _wasn’t I scared the living daylights out of her and I’m never going to forgive myself_ and settled on a small, mumbled, “I don’t know.”

His mom tugged his hand over the center console, and then toyed with his fingers, carefully, like he was breakable—her hands were smaller than his, now, and he had a clear memory of pressing his palm to hers and understanding how tiny he really was, when he was a kid. He’d never do that again. “Sweetheart,” his mom said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Percy snapped. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about anything.”

His voice was louder than he’d thought it’d been, too loud for a closed-off car, and his mom flinched backward. Percy watched her jaw work and her shoulders move as she breathed long and slow, deep intentional breaths, because it was like having razor wire pulled through his nerves, because he couldn’t feel his own heartbeat around how much his chest hurt. He’d forgotten that his voice had gotten deeper, that when he spoke harshly or loudly around his mom she remembered someone else.

_Can’t even say ‘no’ right,_ he thought, and then he tore his gaze away, because whatever reserves he’d had, he’d run through them. He registered his mom getting out of the car, the kneejerk _good, leave me here, I’ll suffocate,_ and then the door beside him was opening, and his mom was crouched on the concrete beside of him.

She squeezed his knee. “I’m okay, baby,” she said, and maybe that was what undid him, the _okay._ He twisted in the seat and almost fell on top of her, with how fast he reached for his mom. Her arms were around him in a second, in maybe the most awkward hug they’d ever had, because he was hugging her while halfway in the passenger’s seat and she was crouched outside, but she was holding him. He didn’t know how he ever thought he could make it, without that, without her hand running up and down his spine through his hoodie.

“Sweetheart, baby, breathe,” she said, and Percy realized he was crying. Crying the way wounded dogs did, from the bottom of the barrel of their chest, that it was tearing at his throat and the wound in his side, and it felt a little bit like drowning on air.

“Sorry,” he managed, the word muffled against her shoulder. “Sorry, Mom.”

“Don’t you ever apologize to me, not for this,” she said. “C’mere, sweetheart.”

He didn’t know, exactly, how long his mom held him on the floor of a parking garage—he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to stop, and that her hand ran up and down his spine constantly. He knew that at some point she started saying sweet, small things, the way she always had. He missed the days where he could curl into her side and fit perfectly, because it seemed simpler to Percy, that even if they’d been going through hell then, it seemed simpler to him that he should fit together with his mom like a puzzle piece. Now it was awkward and his back ached from bending over and his stomach ached because he’d had a hole through it just an hour and a half ago, and it was horrific, the way time marched forward before he got a chance to live it. Had he ever been a kid with his mother, or had he grown up on a highway, speeding through it all? Had it been that long, since he’d last laughed with her?

He stopped long enough to hiss, because the ache in his side had built to a furious, stabbing pain. He wouldn’t be perfectly healed for a while, and event then, healing with nectar and ambrosia left phantom pains, almost like the wound healed too fast for the nervous system to keep track.

“Inside,” his mom said, and Percy almost argued, but she was rising and pulling him out of the car. He tipped too much of his weight against her, forgetting both that he was a lot heavier and that he had to carry at least some of his own weight, and they nearly toppled into the neighboring car before he managed to stay unsteadily upright.

His mom let him go when he was full-body-trembling but on his feet, and ducked into the car and pulled out the hand sanitizer wipes Paul left in the glove box. Paul thought more germs were spread around by kids during the fall semester, despite having no evidence and the trend being against him, so from August to December, it was reliable that there’d be hand sanitizer wipes in the car somewhere.

“Duck a little,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and bright, but she hadn’t been crying, not nearly the way he had.

Percy bent his head and his mom pulled a few wipes out of the bag, and swept under his eyes and down his face, the way someone would cradle a baby bird. She’d done this for his entire life. He remembered being seven and coming home from school with a bloodied face, a black eye, because he’d inherited his sense of control from the sea, and the sea couldn’t restrain itself for anything. She sat him on the kitchen counter and flicked on their deadbeat little radio, and _businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen they dig my earth_ had crooned through the static. She’d hummed along while Percy sulked and she stopped up his nose and made an icepack for his busted head. She poured dish soap into plastic bags and froze them, because they conformed to the body better, and Percy had thought that she’d been so inventive, so clever, and she still was, but now it turned his stomach to think about. He wasn’t the only one who’d learned what a royal flush was, from Gabe Ugliano.

She tossed the bag of wipes and the dirtied ones into the passenger seat, and shut the door. “I’ll get them later,” she said. “Or Paul can just deal.”

Percy hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her against him and buried his face in her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice raspy from the scream-crying, the crying the way wounded dogs on the euthanasia table did.

One of her hands rose to cup the back of his head. “I love you more than anything, Perseus,” she said. “But don’t ever apologize to me for being hurt. Don’t you ever think I want you to hide from me. If you’re not comfortable, that’s one thing, but don’t you ever—you are _my_ son. Before I’m anything else, I’m your mom. And that means I’m here for you.”

Percy barely restrained himself from saying I’m sorry again, and then settled on, “Okay. Okay, I—thanks, Mom.”

She pulled away, and then cupped his cheeks, thumbing his cheekbones. His fingers curled around her wrists almost by instinct. Her eyes were sharp—more blue than green, while his were more green than blue, but he could see where he’d gotten them from, part of where he’d gotten them from. Percy liked to think he looked like his mom, but every shade was just slightly off; his skin was browner, and his hair was darker, and his eyes were greener. But they had the same curls and the same cheekbone and the same jawline, and when he’d been twelve and all he knew of Poseidon was the god of the sea thought he was a mistake, he used to stare at the mirror and count the ways he was his mother’s son.

“One more time,” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

Percy’s heart crawled into his throat. “A lot,” he said, and it was, at least, the truth.

His mom nodded, and offered him a small, watery smile. It helped. “Closer,” she said. “Why don’t we go inside, before we both freeze.”

She walked him home. She kept her hand hovering over the small of his back, pressing him forward, and even if he no longer had the Curse of Achilles, it made him shudder—just the value of it, his mother’s love. That there was no one person on the planet that knew him better, that would ever know him better, and she was still here, walking him home. That whatever was left of him in the wreckage, at least his mom saw something worthwhile, something worth saving, something worth bringing home.

They kicked off their shoes at the door—the kitchen was empty, but not for long, because Annabeth came around the corner almost instantly. Her hair was wild and wickedly curly, because it’d gotten wet in the shower, and her hair always curled up like that if she didn’t brush it after a shower. Her face was splotchy and bright red and she had changed clothes again, into a Spider-Man shirt four times her size and plaid pajama pants, both of which were Percy’s.

His mom reacted faster than Percy did. She moved around Percy, who stood stock-still in the doorway gaping stupidly at someone he’d seen a thousand times, and took Annabeth by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “We’re alright,” she said, warmly. “How was dinner?”

“It was great,” Annabeth said, quietly. “I’m sorry, I—”

“You’re fine,” his mom said, cutting her off. “Where’s Paul?”

“Living room,” Annabeth answered. “He’s grading papers. His students, they’re—they write the funniest stuff.”

Percy swallowed against the knowledge that his stepdad had been there for Annabeth when he hadn’t, that it was Paul who had been making sure Annabeth didn’t work herself into a fit the way she did when she was worried, that it was Paul drawing laughs out of her. The feeling of inadequacy wasn’t new to him but it burned in his throat all the same, and he looked away, whatever spell that had left him staring breathlessly at Annabeth broken by guilt.

“If you want seconds, of course, there’s probably leftovers,” his mom said. She gestured to the fridge. “What’s ours is yours, if you’re hungry, please eat. If you get tired, you can take Percy’s bed, he doesn’t mind at all.”

Hidden in that was the coded but leave us alone for now, and Percy knew that had to ache in Annabeth—she could never stand the thought of people holding conversations without her, of people intentionally excluding her. People who should have loved her had done that to her all her life. He was torn between the knowledge that he’d never get through a conversation with Annabeth in the room, and defending her right to be there, but his mom had a way of gently letting people down. She had a way of saying things in the kindest way, even if they were hard to hear, because Annabeth’s brows only drew together the slightest bit, and she nodded, and slipped only somewhat reluctantly back into the living room. Percy could hear the sound of Paul’s voice greeting her, welcoming her. Paul had always liked Annabeth a lot.

His mom squeezed his hand. “Did you eat?” she asked. She left _today_ off of the question, but it was implied, because she almost always asked him _did you eat today_ when he got home. She had the sharpest eyes of anyone he knew. She knew he slept through his lunch period without bothering to eat anything, and she somehow knew it before Percy himself even consciously realized it had become an everyday thing, instead of an every other day thing. But in leaving today off he tried to remember the last time he’d eaten more than a little, and couldn’t. Couldn’t recall eating more than a few mouthfuls of dinner or snagging an apple here and there. He stood there and gaped at someone he’d seen a hundred thousand times. For the first time in a long time, he realized how profoundly little he enjoyed anything, and how profoundly bad it really was.

His lack of answer was answer enough, and his mom guided him to a chair at the kitchen table in the corner of the room. “Scrambled eggs,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, either. Percy almost asked why she’d go through the trouble of making something new, when she could just reheat leftovers; but then, if he couldn’t figure out how long it’d been since he’d last eaten anything real, she had even less of an idea. It had to be something light.

Annabeth skittered through the room while his mom whipped the eggs with a fork, darting around for a glass of water. She cut her eyes at him as she left, and he looked back at her, and he offered him a small smile, and it meant the world to him. The world and everything in it, in one person, one place, one moment. His mom made him eat slow, and down two glasses of water—eating had the opposite effect it should have, it made him hungrier, even if the uncomfortable weight of food in his stomach made him kind of nauseous. He rose and loaded the dishes in the dishwasher before his mom could, and when he turned she’d pulled the prescription pain medication he took sometimes for the lasting, twisting pain in his burn scars, out of the cabinet.

“It looks like it hurts, dear,” she said, by way of explanation.

Percy nodded, tightly, and knocked back the pills with another glass of water. His mom pressed her hand between his shoulder blades, warm and soothing the ache in the muscles there, the one that seemed to live in him these days. Then her hand crossed and tapped his shoulder. “Your scars look dry,” she said.

Percy’s hand rose and scrubbed at the left side of his neck, and the scars scrawled there, and sure enough they were dry and hot and itchy. He’d gotten good at ignoring them, while on a quest across the world. He scratched absently and then his mom’s hand closed around his wrist and pulled it down, and Percy looked away; the first adjustment had been miserable, fucking miserable, because they’d hurt enough that he kept tearing them open over and over with his nails because he couldn’t handle the pain being under the skin, it had to pour out of him, too. Being fifteen had been a year peppered with the white bathroom light in the middle of the night, because he clawed himself bloody even in his sleep, and his mom learned to check in on him and shake him out of the nightmares of burning alive. She’d rubbed ointment into the splits of the skin, where it’d dried out and Percy had torn it open, and bandaged it, while their deadbeat radio crooned _all along the watchtower, princes kept the view,_ and she hummed along and sopped up his blood at the same time. What had been miserable to him then was bearable now. He’d discovered all new lows.

“Keep forgetting,” he said, quietly.

“My bathroom,” she said, and Percy slouched off down the hall, on the familiar route to his mom’s room. He crouched on the edge of the bathtub and waited, and then his mom appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, a bottle of lotion and a towel in hand.

“Sweatshirt off,” she said, jerking up with her free hand. She dropped the bottle next to the sink, and Percy pulled his sweatshirt over his head, looking away while his mom registered the bandages on his stomach and the dried bloodstains that hadn’t quite washed away.

She started with his hand, because it was the worst of the scars, the two last fingers on that hand. She worked the lotion in carefully and smoothly—her hands knew where to go, where to work it in and where to pass over. He missed the radio, and the garbled sound of Jimi Hendrix fading through it. He hadn’t seen it in years.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. “But Annabeth said—she said I needed it.”

Her hands pressed into the side of his wrist and flipped his arm over, spreading cool lotion on the gnarled swirls. “You do,” she said. “But that’s not just you. Everyone needs to be worried over, sometimes. Everyone deserves a little worry for their sake.”

Percy swallowed. “I don’t like that.”

“You don’t like taking up space,” she said. Her thumb worked into one of the ravines he’d left in his arm by his own hand, a day where he’d been sent home during math class because he’d pushed his hand underneath the other sleeve of his hoodie and dug, trying to stay awake. “You love people, and you love having them. But you don’t want to cost them anything. You don’t want them to think about you, and you want them to see you enough that you have them, but anything further—you don’t want that.”

Percy’s eyes stung. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he fixed his eyes on the linoleum, the rumpled shower mat, the way one of his socks was a dark gray and the other was a black.

“Letting people love you means that they’re going to worry about you,” she said. “That’s not a problem. That’s something you deserve.”

The wreckage, and whatever his mom saw in him, and rot bubbled up in his chest. “I killed it. The boar. And then I covered up and went to Annabeth’s dorm. And I got there and I thought I was gonna ask, you know, the way—I should have. She was so scared, Mom. She was so—she was terrified. Because I just sat down and didn’t—say anything. I didn’t want to.”

He watched his mom’s face, then, because it was like swallowing liquid fire. It was nothing dramatic—his mom’s poker face was the best one there was—but her eyes closed briefly and her brows pulled tight together, and then she leaned forward and kissed Percy’s temple.

“What happened after that,” she said, almost deathly quiet.

Percy swallowed against the ice that was back in his throat. “She… patched me up. She was terrified. I—I didn’t mean to scare her. We talked, some, after, and then she… she called you. And now we’re here.”

“And now we’re here,” his mom repeated. His mom’s hands had stopped moving over his arm, but she still held it in her grip. It was getting tighter. “Tell me what you told her.”  
  


Percy was silent for long enough that his mom started working again, calmly, but he could feel it, the steel in her. The strength she hid, the way she was indomitable, the way she’d expected him to come home from Mount Saint Helens and he had and she’d expected him to come back from Greece and he had. His mom didn’t pressure him for a lot, but the one thing she had always asked of him was that he be good, and the one thing he’d always tried to be was half as good as she was. He wasn’t sure how to tell her how completely he’d failed her. He wasn’t sure how to tell her that he wasn’t good enough to ignore the saltwater in him, that he was as violent as the hurricanes that beat the land were, that he was as violent as the earth was easily shook.

“I’m not good,” he said, finally. “I try to be, but I’m—not. I shouldn’t have survived, when—other people didn’t. I can’t do what people think I can. I don’t help people the way I should. This isn’t the first time I’ve scared Annabeth. In Tartarus, I—I choked Akhlys, the misery goddess. I asked the water to drown her and it did. I wanted it to. I wanted her to suffer.”

His mom had stopped working again. She had stopped touching him altogether, and was wiping off her hands on the towel, and it was her lack of response that spurred Percy forward. “I think about drowning,” he said. “I think I could do it to myself the way I did it to her. That’s what you do, when—when people are dangerous, you—”

_Euthanize,_ he supplied in his head, but he couldn’t say that out loud. “Royal flush,” he finished, weakly.

His mom took his face in her hands, the way she’d done in the parking garage, but now she was rigid. She looked almost angrier than he’d ever seen her, and somehow it didn’t hurt to look at—it was deserved anger, maybe. When she spoke her voice was sharp. “It took me years to learn this. It should’ve been the first thing I taught you, because it’s the first thing you needed to know. When I tell you to listen, Perseus Jackson, you listen to me, are we clear?”

He nodded, jolted, knowing his eyes were wide like saucers.

She took a long breath before speaking. “What you do in self-defense doesn’t define you. It isn’t who you are. You’re not bad because you reacted to being hurt by hurting someone else to protect yourself, baby. The only person to blame is the person hurting you. Wanting people who choose to hurt you to hurt in return is how people normally think. You are not uniquely bad, and you’re not bad at all. You’re doing your best. And your best, sweetheart, is pretty damn good.”

“What if you’re wrong,” Percy mumbled.

She raised a brow. “You’ve never thought I was wrong for murdering my ex-husband. Why do the rules change for you?”

Percy flinched, and his mom let him go, letting him pull away. “I don’t know,” he said, working his jaw, looking everywhere but at his mom. “I don’t know. I don’t.”

“You’re a great kid. You’ve just had a bad run,” she said, softly.

Percy scrubbed his face. “I’m—I’m—I’m tired, of that, of it, of having a bad run, I’m tired of that,” he said, rapidly. “I want that, that, over. I don’t want this. I don’t want it at all.”

His mom’s hand worked through his hair, ruffling it. “Take a minute. Take a deep breath. You’re going to be happy, Percy, we’ll make it happen. But that takes time.”

Percy screwed his eyes shut, at that, and schooled his breathing. His mom worked lotion into the scars over his shoulder, and somewhere along the way, she started humming _All Along the Watchtower,_ in the crooked way she did; her voice hitched and even just humming she was out of tune, but it settled Percy like nothing else. She’d been doing it all his life. He tilted his head to the side, baring his throat to her, so she could lather up the scars there, and then she backed away and wiped her hands on the towel, bending over to pick up Percy’s hoodie and handed it to him. He pulled it on, and let his mom lead him into the bedroom with her hand pressed to the small of his back.

“You don’t leave my sight, tonight,” she said. “You don’t—you don’t leave my sight.”

Her voice broke, and Percy’s heart twisted. She settled in the bed and he settled beside her, feeling somehow better and worse than he had in a long time, and his mom pulled him closer, until his head was on her stomach and her arm was over his shoulders.

“What about school,” he mumbled.

Her hands ran through his hair, and he leaned into it, maybe a little embarrassed that he felt desperate for it, but not enough to keep him still. “Do you think I could convince Chiron to forge some doctor’s notes,” she said. “For the rest of the week.”

Percy blinked. “For—for?”

“I want to take you to Montauk,” she said. Her thumb brushed his temple. “I don’t know. Get you away from the city, for a bit. Give you space to breathe. I’m good about deadlines, I can have some pushed back, the once.”

“That sounds,” he said, and he couldn’t speak, around the emotion in him. He couldn’t say that sounds like the best thing in the world right now, couldn’t say that he sometimes he just didn’t want to be a hero, a savior, or a monster, that he just wanted to be the one thing he’d been born to be; Sally Jackson’s son. “I can’t,” he said, finally.

She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “You can,” she said. “I’m the mom.”

“I’m—failing,” he said. “My classes. I’m—probably not going to—I’m sorry.”

Her hand rubbed small circles into his back. “Baby,” she said, “I don’t give one singular flying fuck if you fail your classes this year. I don’t care. You can drop out and get your GED, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. I want my baby boy alive and happy. We can figure the rest out.”

Percy closed his eyes. It was a little embarrassing, that he’d cried something like his bodyweight in water already, but he wanted to cry again—pressed against her and hearing that the things that had stressed him out enough he’d been sick over it, they didn’t matter to her. That maybe it didn’t matter if he thought he was good enough to be deserving of every sacrifice his mom had ever made for him, that his mom thought he was, and that was a good place to start.

He drifted off, next to his mother’s warmth, because when he roused next it was because there was a squeak of laminate flooring somewhere behind him.

Annabeth stood in the doorway, silhouetted in the blue lowlight. He could see her well enough to make out her face, and her swollen eyes. _Are you okay,_ she mouthed.

He gave her a small smile, and hoped it meant the world to her. _Better,_ he mouthed back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I made it a bit nicer while I made it a bit meaner. I think I did both, I think I contain the multitudes.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel bad ending it there, but it's a prompt fic, and I can only go so far. I hate the scene where Percy talks about this with Jason in BOO more than anything. I hate it so much, I hate it with my all of me. Fuck that scene, I don't vibe with bringing up serious issues like that and then not..... resolving it. Anyway! Hope you enjoyed <3
> 
> Update: I added a Sally part. :)


End file.
